Stranger Than Fiction: I Woke Up to Discover I’d Become a Character I’d Written
It should have been one of the best days of my writing career.
After months of editing, reworking, and retooling my first published work, it finally got released on Amazon. Like a mother waiting for the birth of a child, I had long awaited for this piece of me to be born. It’s something every little kid with a pencil and a notebook dreams of (or in today’s generation, a little kid with a laptop and an imagination).
However, the book’s release coincided with a low-point in my writing career: a mass lay-off at my full-time job, where I was one of the casualties.
It wasn’t until days later when I woke up in my pajamas on a Tuesday afternoon that I made a startling realization: I had become the very character I had written in this book! Jobless, undervalued, and scrambling for my next move.
Like my character Vera in Loan Some, I, too, was now unemployed and sleeping in, waking up braless and out of work.
Sample text:
“It’s three o’clock, she said to herself. I suppose it’s time to put on a bra.”
Furthermore, Vera was a librarian, deemed obsolete due to evolving technology. She was a dinosaur in a dying industry, where people would rather Google a book than use the Dewey Decimal System.
Sample text:
“This generation’s idea of a card catalog is an ironic antique you see in some hipster’s studio apartment.”
While my job as a writer and editor wasn’t necessarily on life support like Vera’s, it was determined trivial, the first to be hacked when it came to trimming fat and saving money. Like Vera, I worked in an undervalued industry, compared to engineers, tech specialists, and other “it” professions of the moment.
Of course, becoming your character isn’t new. Plenty of other popular writers are, in essence, their characters. Some examples include Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and even Lena Dunham (not a bad group of people to be included with). But have many writers, unpopular like me or otherwise, ever experienced becoming their characters after it was published? Rule No. 1 of writing is probably “Write what you know,” but in this case, I had written what I would know or would come to know.
I had never intended Vera to be much of anything like me. In fact, I was conscious of the effort to make her anything but me, because I didn’t want people to ask me, “Oh, so she’s you, right?” (Because any main character a writer creates has to be an exact representation of the author.) I liked writing Vera because I had to remember that she wasn’t me and saw things differently from the way I would visualize them. It challenged me to create unique reactions and to ask myself, “Who is this character and what does she want?”
Sure, like Vera, I also like to read books, but I’m 5'2" (she’s much taller, I always pictured 5'8"), a dirty blonde (she’s a redhead), and I live my life in movies and television (she knows nothing, Jon Snow, about popular culture and would rather read Game of Thrones the book than watch the HBO series, which I would NEVER do). And yet, somehow, Vera and I had found common ground and became the same person. Can writers ever really get away from their characters? Maybe we’re all really writing our own destinies when we write what we know.
What’s interesting is that fiction writers often write in order to fix their own problems. It’s almost a form of therapy. At the end of Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer (another writer who is his characters) says: “You know how you’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because, uh, it’s real difficult in life?” Every writer can admit to trying to do this. That’s the fun of writing. It’s getting to explore good and bad situations without ever having to participate in them. Some might call writers “life’s great observers,” but perhaps we’re just hashing things out before we take a step. Maybe in writing Vera, a character who’s at a career crossroads, I was at a professional intersection of my own, trying to figure out what my future might be in an ever-changing industry. In creating this world, maybe I was anticipating my own problems that would arise and how I would combat them.
Hemingwey once wrote, “Create people, not characters.” And maybe by learning that I am my character, I succeeded in that. But based on the experience of writing a future that comes into fruition, from now on I will remember to create characters that travel the world, eat Chipotle without getting indigestion, and become besties with RuPaul (a reference I know Vera would never understand).
